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Helmet Design Absorbs Shock in a New Way

Vin Ferrara, a former Harvard quarterback, was looking for an aspirin in his medicine cabinet when his eyes fixed upon a ribbed plastic bottle used to squirt saline into sinuses. Ferrara squeezed the bottle, then pounded on it — finding that it cushioned soft and hard blows with equal aplomb, almost intelligence.

“This is it,” Ferrara declared. Three years later, Ferrara’s squirt bottle has led to a promising new technology to protect football players from concussions.

Football helmets have evolved over more than a century from crude leather bonnets to face-masked, polycarbonate battering rams. But they still often fail to protect brains from the sudden forces that cause concussions. Studies have found that 10 to 50 percent of high school players each season sustain concussions, whose effects can range from persistent memory problems and depression to coma and death.

Contemporary helmet manufacturers have made a point of improving protection against concussions. But experts suspect that Ferrara, who sustained several concussions as a player himself, has developed a radically effective design.

Rather than being lined with rows of traditional foam or urethane, Ferrara’s helmet features 18 black, thermoplastic shock absorbers filled with air that — not unlike his squirt bottle — can accept a wide range of forces and still moderate the sudden jarring of the head that causes concussion. Moreover, laboratory tests have shown that the disks can withstand hundreds of impacts without any notable degradation in performance, a longtime drawback of helmets’ traditional foam.

Dr. Robert Cantu of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, one of the nation’s leading experts in concussion management, called it “the greatest advance in helmet design in at least 30 years.”

Cantu informally advised Ferrara during the helmet’s development but has no financial relationship with the product.

Dr. Gerry Gioia, a pediatric neuropsychologist who directs the concussion program at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, said Ferrara’s helmet could “take helmet protection to a whole new level.”

“I think it’s very real,” Gioia said. “Foams have only had a certain amount of success in absorbing force. Think of what crumple zones in cars meant to reducing injuries. That’s the idea behind this technology — this does what it’s supposed to do better than any other.”

The helmet has not yet been tested by actual players in games. Earlier this month, it passed certification tests conducted by the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, which certifies helmet models worn by each of the more than 2 million football players in the United States, from pee-wees to professionals.

Ferrara said that his company, Xenith LLC, expected the helmet to be available for the 2008 football season — either produced by Xenith or perhaps by license to an existing manufacturer. The price will be about $350, more than twice the cost of existing headgear. Ferrara, who after graduating from Harvard in 1996 earned medical and business degrees from Columbia, said he expected marketing to focus less on schools, whose budgets are tight, than parents with concern for their child.

“This is more a piece of safety equipment, along the lines of a child car seat, than just a piece of athletic equipment,” Ferrara said.

After raising $10 million in venture capital, Ferrara assembled the engineering team that has turned that squirt bottle into a finished helmet. Three high schools, which Ferrara declined to name because he had promised them anonymity, will begin field-testing it next month. Meanwhile, Ferrara has begun presenting the helmet and its test results to groups of football decision-makers, including the athletic directors of the Big Ten Conference last week.

“It really caught my attention,” said Barry Alvarez, the University of Wisconsin athletic director and former football coach. “Coaches and trainers should really see this thing.”

An N.F.L. spokesman said that the league was aware of Ferrara’s helmet design but had not reviewed it enough to comment.

Photo

Vin Ferrara, a former Harvard quarterback and the founder of Xenith LLC, with a helmet that will cost about $350.Credit
Rebecca D'Angelo for The New York Times

In part due to liability concerns, the number of helmet manufacturers has decreased over two decades from more than half a dozen to three: Riddell, Schutt and Adams. Eighty-four percent of N.F.L. players choose helmets made by Riddell, which also has an exclusive marketing agreement with the league. Schutt and Adams have far greater market shares on the high school and youth levels, respectively, while exclusive arrangements within leagues or schools are discouraged because head sizes fit better in different brands.

Football helmets present the technological challenge of protecting against all manner of blows to the head and also doing so thousands of times. (Bicycle helmets, by contrast, are designed to withstand just one major, accidental impact.) Optimally, a helmet’s interior must be forgiving enough to cushion against a routine impact while also sturdy enough to withstand a potentially lethal one — each level of force requires a different response from the material.

To earn certification, a helmet is impact-tested at dozens of forces and angles, with the energy it still allows to reach the skull measured by what is called severity index. The helmet must always score at 1,200 or below on the severity index because that is the zone that causes fractured skulls, the injury whose prevention historically has been emphasized — quite successfully — in football. Concussions become likely at a severity index of about 300; the certification agency has feared demanding that level of protection because of potential sacrifices it might mean at higher levels.

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During its certification test this month, the Xenith helmet scored in the 200’s in several key locations and averaged about 340, scores generally lower than those attained by today’s helmet designs. The certification agency’s executive director, Mike Oliver, strongly cautioned against comparing test scores because differences are not as meaningful as they appear.

“Concussion is the big elephant in the room right now when it comes to helmets, and I’m cautiously optimistic at how low these numbers are,” Oliver said. “But you can test as much as you want, and we won’t really know until it’s tested in the field and we see how it performs.”

Ferrara, 34, shared Oliver’s caution and said that no helmet could prevent concussion — all it could do is decrease the chance for one. “You can’t put a seat belt on the brain,” he said.

In general, only about 20 percent of helmets in use by high schools at any one time are less than one year old; a vast majority are reconditioned every one to three years, as budgets permit. Reconditioned helmets are cleaned, receive new bolts and undergo random drop testing to the certification agency’s 1,200 severity-index standard. But the process does little to address the foam padding that degrades over time and provides less protection against the lower-level impacts that cause concussion, according to Dave Halstead, the agency’s technical director.

Horror stories regarding use of deteriorated helmets are not uncommon. Six years ago, Max Conradt, a high school player in Yachats, Ore., was wearing a 20-year-old helmet when he sustained hits that left him comatose for two months and permanently impaired. Halstead said he had seen helmets with padding replaced by athletic socks and with screw points exposed.

Beyond those rare cases, however, Halstead estimated that half of helmets in use at the high school level are either improperly reconditioned, have foam degradation or fit poorly. This leaves them susceptible to the lower-level forces that cause the majority of concussions, rather than the higher grades for which the agency tests. The certification agency does test hockey and lacrosse helmets at both high and low levels — an extra step that Halstead said his organization should strongly consider for football, as more data are collected on its effectiveness.

“There is concern that changing anything about the standards can affect the safety we’ve already attained,” Halstead said. “The unanswered questions are real. But the injuries we see because of concussions are also real, and are becoming more important.”

Ferrara said that internal tests on his helmet’s shock absorbers had shown no notable degradation after hundreds of hits. That, along with the helmet’s promising test scores, have left Cantu imagining uses for the technology beyond football.

“In the military, you have helmets for pilots and ground troops,” said Cantu, who has also advised the Department of Defense on soldiers’ concussions and other brain injuries. “There’s ice-hockey boards and auto-race barriers. Anything that’s protective in nature, that’s used to attenuate energy, could be improved markedly.”

Other companies are attempting to address football’s concussion quandary. Schutt developed a model called the DNA that uses a thermoplastic urethane liner to attenuate energy as well as foam-filled air bladders for fit.

Simbex, a company based in Lebanon, N.H., has developed a tiny accelerometer that fits inside helmet padding, measures sudden movements of the head and can wirelessly alert a sideline trainer. (Riddell now markets a $1,000 helmet with this technology built in.) While by no means foolproof, the device — now in use in eight colleges and four high schools — can help identify when players sustain a particularly dangerous hit but, wanting to stay on the field, attempt to hide it from medical personnel.

And SportSoft, based in Kirkland, Wash., makes tracking stickers similar to labels on grocery items so that equipment managers can better monitor each helmet’s age and reconditioning history.

Ferrara said he wanted his new shock-absorber helmet design to be only one of several lines of defense against concussions. Mindful that previous helmet improvements have occasionally led athletes to feel a false sense of security and take more risks, he said part of his rollout plan would be to emphasize to players and coaches proper, head-up tackling technique, so that the helmet sees fewer dangerous hits to begin with — as well as encouraging athletes to admit when they think they might have a concussion.

“The educational side of it is just as important, if not more important, as the helmet itself,” Ferrara said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Far From Grandpa’s Leather, Helmet Absorbs Shock a New Way. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe